In May, a seventeen-year-old boy committed suicide by jumping into a river because he worked 12 hours a day on the assembly line at the Wuhu Auto Parts Factory in Anhui.
Previously, a student in Hubei died of sudden cardiac arrest after three consecutive weeks of night shifts; a 17-year-old nursing student in Yunnan was sent to an electronics factory and died of respiratory failure after three denied leave requests.
They are vocational school students, “interning.” No one knows what he was thinking in his last few hours, perhaps he wanted to go home, perhaps he wanted to escape, perhaps he was just too tired, so tired that he felt life itself was no longer worth continuing.
CCTV.com exposed the black industry chain of vocational school internships, “No internship means no graduation certificate,” “500 yuan per person fee,” “Team leaders charge 10 yuan per day for supervision” – I cannot help but think of the contract-bound contract workers in Xia Yan’s writings.
The only difference is that back then, it was a contract of sale that locked them up, and now it is a graduation certificate that locks them up.
“500 yuan per person fee for introducing an intern” “The factory quotes intermediaries 25 yuan/hour, while the school gives students 15 yuan/hour” “A few hundred yuan minimum wage for the first three months, and at most one to two thousand yuan for the last two months,” students have become “assets” that are clearly priced, and “12 hours of work per day” has become the norm.
300 students, working 26 days a month, 10 hours a day, the school can make hundreds of thousands of yuan just from the price difference. If the school is larger, with thousands of people, millions per month is not difficult.
The per-person fee is a more direct and naked profit. Intermediaries pay the school per person, 500 yuan each, half paid upfront, and the remaining balance paid after the student completes the internship. To prevent “asset loss,” the school even has to send team leaders to collect a “supervision fee” of 10 yuan per day.
Supervision fee – these three words are worth savoring. The school knows very well that the students are not there voluntarily, otherwise there would be no need for supervision, and the school also knows very well that these students are not learning, otherwise there would be no need to prevent them from running away.
In the eyes of the school, these children are not students, but monthly settled productivity, money-making assets.
A student majoring in fashion design was sent to operate a sewing machine for twelve hours a day, pricking her finger, and was not even allowed to seek medical attention. This happened in 2026, you read that right.
The reason for such madness is the huge profit behind it. Every link is profitable, so every link is tacitly understood.
Factories save a lot on labor costs; students are cheaper and more obedient than formal workers. Intermediaries take from both sides, accepting factory orders with their left hand and demanding commissions from schools with their right. Schools get the price difference and per-person fees, and also complete the “school-enterprise cooperation” assessment indicators.
The three parties get what they need, and everyone is happy.
They all made money, but someone had to pay the price, right? That price is the students.
They are held back by their graduation certificates, and also constrained by internship credits, with team leaders monitoring attendance. With no channels for complaints or rights protection, they are actually trapped in a meticulously designed closed loop, unable to escape.
Why is this black industry chain so difficult to expose? Because schools and other interested parties have long learned to cover it up.
The internship plan is formal, the team leaders are assigned by the school, and the cooperation agreement even bears the school’s official seal. In fact, everything is “compliant and legal.”
The official regulation that “internships shall not be organized for profit” is not being enforced.
Like many other rotten industries, various clever name changes can easily deal with the already weak regulation.
In fact, there is no need to avoid or hide anything. In all our industries, there are too many such “open unwritten rules,” everyone knows and sees them, but they just take the abnormal as normal, and the illegal as legal.
Will the exposure of the black industry chain of vocational school internships by CCTV really be useful? I remain pessimistic.
Because, in the eyes of those people, all this is normal – what’s wrong with exploiting an intern? Aren’t they just some underachievers who can only work in factories?
Vocational school students are perhaps the most silent and marginalized group in the Chinese education system. This is also why few media outlets and public opinion speak for them.
They mostly come from ordinary families, rural families, with no many choices or ways out. After the high school entrance examination, they are sent to vocational schools, carrying a label of inferiority, and grow up in a subtle social prejudice. Their voices are rarely heard, and their difficulties are naturally rarely noticed.
The suffering of undergraduates is easily seen; but the suffering of vocational school students seems to be taken for granted.
This marginalization is the most fertile soil for the black industry chain.
A seventeen-year-old child, with almost zero social experience and no awakened awareness of rights protection. They can only endure overtime work, even thinking it is “the price they should pay.” In the face of dangerous positions, they often dare not refuse.
The team leader is the “god” who controls their life and death, how dare they say half a word of refusal?
The cost of resistance is too great – not getting a graduation certificate, possibly not graduating, parents who worked hard and spent money to send them to school will shed tears, and they will have no way out.
Governing this black industry chain by just arresting a few intermediaries is far from enough. Intermediaries are just one link in the chain, and as long as the market exists, they will continue to breed.
The root lies in: How can schools be supervised to organize compliant internships transparently throughout the process? Why does the school have so much power to threaten students by withholding graduation certificates? Why are the internship profits flowing into gray accounts not investigated?
And, are local education regulatory departments turning a blind eye to this?
It must be achieved: student remuneration is part of the labor law protection and must be directly deposited into the student’s personal account, with no interception or rebates in any form. Graduation certificates cannot be linked to mandatory internships, students have the right to choose internship units related to their major, and there are channels to appeal unreasonable arrangements.
“Highly valuing” the situation only after media exposure and arresting a few intermediaries – this has been the cycle for more than a decade, is it useful?
Under all news about the black industry chain of vocational school internships online, netizens say it has been like this for more than ten years, and it is like this everywhere.
In a true rule of law environment, matters involving student rights and the protection of minors should be subject to double accountability and double punishment. But the reality is that students and minors have become “vulnerable groups” who can be bullied by anyone.
Vocational education should not continue to be regarded as a “gray area” of education. As long as it is education, it is about teaching people how to establish themselves in society, not about supplying labor to human traffickers. Schools should focus on teaching and connecting with reliable enterprises, not on packaging and selling students to factories for price differences.
Using graduation certificates to control vocational school students, I have heard of this happening many times in my life.
These young people usually suffer a cruel “first lesson of society” in their hearts: the school, which should have been their trusted protector, instead sold them to the factory, and the graduation certificate became a rope around their necks.
They thought that an internship was the first step towards society and approaching their dreams, but instead, the first step led them into a quagmire.
They also often come from disadvantaged families with narrow prospects, and attending vocational school is one of the few possibilities they can find. Their tuition fees are often raised by their families through various means, and their honest parents can hardly find other ways to support them.
As a result, they have become the most succulent meat on the black industry chain.
Seventeen years old, it should be an age when there is still light in their eyes. However, when he stands on the assembly line for twelve hours a day, pricks his finger and cannot see a doctor, and even more cruelly, people around him tell him that he should endure it.
The light in his eyes could only be extinguished bit by bit.
How desperate must the boy who ultimately chose death have been? The most terrifying thing is that such a thing happened within the education system that should have protected young people.
The children standing on the assembly line are constantly paying for a rotten system with their youth, health, and even lives.
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